Migrant children have been in US custody for weeks. Now the Biden administration has to reunite them with families
ZUMAPRESS.com
For a month, Meybelin has lived in a massive convention center located in the heart of San Diego. There, along with hundreds of other migrant children, she waits day in and day out to be released to a relative in the United States, frequently calling her parents in El Salvador distraught about the prolonged wait.
Meybelin, 17, is one of the more than 20,000 minors in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services as a result of a record number of unaccompanied children and teenagers arriving at the US southern border this year. The Biden administration has scrambled to assist the department’s already-strained resources and are using a host of novel locations, like convention centers, to shelter minors.
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On a cold, rainy night last November, Bastian Rodriguez spent the first hours of his 18th birthday inside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement van. Rodriguez was aging out of the Cowlitz County Youth Services Center, a juvenile jail in Longview, Wash., and was on his way to the Northwest ICE Processing Center, a privately run immigration detention facility for adults in Tacoma. He had already spent more than two years in ICE custody.
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Republicans blast current approach, including deployment of feds across government to the border.
Senior Correspondent
Lawmakers and a top Biden administration official traded barbs Thursday over who was responsible for an uptick in migrants arriving at the southern border and how to use federal personnel to confront the situation.
Homeland Security Department Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended his approach, highlighting the reduction in migrant children being held in Border Patrol facilities. The Biden administration has worked aggressively to transfer children from DHS custody to the Health and Human Services Department and on to legal sponsors, tapping the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stand up additional housing units. DHS has slashed the number of unaccompanied children who arrived at the border and remained in Border Patrol custody from nearly 6,000 at its peak e
Some migrant children stuck overnight on parked buses before going to family or sponsors, advocate says Dasha Burns and Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez and Anthony Terrell
DALLAS In a vast parking lot outside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, minors who migrated to the U.S. without their parents are waiting on buses to be sent to live with relatives or sponsors, staying overnight, eating and using the bathroom all within the confines of the bus, according to the owner of one of the bus companies and advocates for the children.
In at least one case described to NBC News, a family says their 15-year-old son waited on buses from Saturday to Wednesday before beginning the long journey from Dallas to Seattle.
The grounds of Bexar County s Freeman Coliseum
The use of Bexar County’s Freeman Coliseum Expo Hall as an emergency migrant shelter is not expected to continue after the end of the month, the Federal Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed.
The coliseum’s expo hall has been used to house up to 2,400 migrant children who have surrendered themselves to or were found by border patrol agents since late March. HHS approached the county to use the site in mid-March to temporarily hold migrant children while members or sponsors in the U.S. are located.
Earlier this week, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff speculated the contract would not continue.